


acting on your best behavior

by therm0dynamics



Series: everybody wants to rule the world [1]
Category: Narcos (TV)
Genre: Angry Making Out, Angst, Character Analysis, M/M, doing all the work the show writers didn't
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-21
Updated: 2017-05-21
Packaged: 2018-11-03 05:15:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10960446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/therm0dynamics/pseuds/therm0dynamics
Summary: And isn’t this just a fitting picture of his life down here — him, backed into a corner, and his partner with all his righteous fury before him, and the everpresent promise of violence at his back. They never did fight this out in the embassy.





	acting on your best behavior

**Author's Note:**

> oh look! i've gotten invested in another small fandom that isn't as angsty/scandalous/heavy on the character analysis and philosophical musings as i'm making it out to be. spoilers for stuff up to 2x01; title by tears for fears.

When Peña arrives at the local precinct, he finds Murphy slouched on a bench in the back of a grimy holding cell looking almost relaxed, almost apathetic. He’s got bloody knuckles and a hard, ugly smirk on his face that could cut glass.

“Javi, brother,” Murphy drawls, throwing his arms out wide in mock-welcome, his badge glinting on his belt. The three others in lockup with him, sullen-faced locals, sit against the wall furthest away from him and look wary. “Y'missed the party.” 

“He’s yours?” the officer manning the intake desk asks, bored, not looking up from listlessly sorting paperwork.

“ _Desafortunadamente,”_ Peña mutters. He supposes if Murphy belonged to anyone out here now, it would be him. It sure as shit wasn’t his wife anymore, by the looks of it.

The other officers barely bat an eye as Peña half-drags Murphy out of the station and into his car. What one jerkoff American did to another was none of their business. They weren't paid enough — or more likely, too well paid off — to care.

“You got a lighter?” Murphy asks as soon as they pull out of the police station, digging a carton of cigarettes out of his jacket. “Those assholes confiscated mine.”

Peña tosses over his lighter and Murphy chain-smokes pensively, flicking the butts out the window. Besides his partner’s uncharacteristic silence, everything feels jarringly routine, like they’re out on another neighborhood patrol, like Murphy didn’t just have a sudden break with reality and beat a cokehead businessman half to death in an airport bathroom.

“So,” Peña finally says.

“So what?” Murphy asks. The nasty grin pasted on his face has not wavered. He tilts his head back and blows a long stream of smoke at the roof of the car. 

“You okay?”

“Never better, Javi.”

Murphy’s not really as drunk as he maybe wants Peña to believe. The hard gleam in his eyes gives him away — it’s not the look of a drunk man, it’s the look of a hurt, betrayed, furious man just _daring_ someone to give him an excuse, any excuse, to fuck them up.

Peña carefully keeps his eyes on the road for the rest of the drive home and pretends not to feel the weight of Murphy’s quiet, intense stare on him.

\--

“Hair of the dog,” Peña says, walking into the living room with two glasses half-full of whiskey. He passes one to his partner. “Probably a bad idea, but I’ll risk it.” 

“What an enabler,” Murphy drawls, knocking it all back almost immediately.

“I should’ve left you in there overnight, you blonde fucking _gringo_ disaster.”

Murphy, slouched against the wall in his loose, sprawling way, laughs hollowly. “Maybe you should have. Wouldn’t make a difference either way, I can’t imagine I’ll still have a job tomorrow.”

“Don’t say that,” Peña mutters, perching himself on the back of the couch across from his partner. “Hey. Take the day off tomorrow, sober the fuck up. I’ll talk to Messina.”

“See if you can pull that stick out of her ass while you’re at it,” Murphy says. “Thirty-six hours she’s been here, and she’s already strutting around like she owns the place.”

Peña snorts. “Sure. Because you’re making a great first impression.”

“Yeah, well, fuck her. And fuck Colombia, and fuck the DEA, fuck Gaviria, fuck this job, and _fuck_ Pablo Escobar in particular. I don’t care if they ship me back to the States and court-martial me.”

“You’re just saying that.”

Murphy shrugs and strikes another cigarette.

“I know I screwed up. But I just spent six hours in a drunk tank with nothin' to do but think, and you know what I realized? I don’t even feel sorry. Not just for what I did today, but for any of it. Even all the times we, you know — ” He tilts his chin up and draws two fingers slowly across his throat. “And I know I should, that any normal person would, but I just … don’t. Maybe I can’t anymore. I’m just angry. Always so fuckin’ angry.” 

Peña sighs, rubs a hand over his face.

He's hardly surprised. His partner has been heading down this slippery slope for a while now.

Colombia is a place that changes people. Corrupts them. Peña’s lucky he was born with some kind of moral defect that lets him look the other way when necessary, twist the rules, cross some lines, accept the better of two bad decisions — as little as that means down here. He’s not proud of it, his situational sense of ethics, but it’s helped him stay sane, it’s helped him survive in this jungle-infested blood-soaked circle of hell.

But there’s something more unyielding in his partner, that all-in fucking determination to be _just_ and _fair_ that Peña would call idealism or naiveté if he didn’t secretly kind of admire it. Only, the thing is, people like Murphy in a place like this, they don’t bend, they break. Driven to the edge by slow, punishing inches.

Peña's noticed Murphy pushing himself harder and harder at work, drinking his way through the long nights. He knows Murphy still obsessively pores over his kill photos, even though he swore he’d gotten rid of them. He can guess at what gruesome, mangled images flash through his partner’s mind when he closes his eyes at night. And he’s seen how lately, Murphy is only calm when he has a cigarette between his fingers — or a gun in his hand.

Peña could have guessed that something like this was coming from day one. The bitterly optimistic side of him is grateful that it wasn't anything _worse_.

"Tell me something, _partner_ ,” Murphy says, pushing himself off the wall. He flexes his fingers, looking dispassionately at the dried blood caked on his knuckles.

“Yeah,” Peña says.

“How do you rationalize it to yourself?” Murphy asks. “Everything we have do.”

Peña pauses for a beat, somewhat thrown. He finishes his whiskey, and puts his glass down on a coffee table already littered with beer cans and empty cigarette cartons.

“I tell myself that it’s for the greater good,” he says, carefully. He’s asked himself that exactly question more times than he wants to admit, and he hasn't yet come up with a good enough lie. The truth will have to do.

“For the greater good,” Murphy echoes. He doesn’t look sold.

“Yeah,” Peña says. He has no clue where this is going, but from the dangerous expression on his partner’s face, it’s nowhere good. “And when we finally get those sons of bitches, it’ll be worth what we’ve had to do." 

“Even the bad, fucked-up stuff.”

“Especially the bad, fucked-up stuff.”

“The ends justify the means. That kind of thinking removes a lot of personal accountability for your actions, doesn’t it?”

“That’s pessimistic. I think of it as opening up more options. Which, in case you haven’t noticed, we don't have a lot of to start.”

“Mm. Must take a lot of mental fuckin’ gymnastics to make that okay, with the body count being what it is.”

“Oh, you think _you’re_ innocent?” Peña snaps. “You’re right here with me, doing the same work I do … _partner_.”

He knows he’s scored a cheap point when Murphy cuts his look to the side and scoffs like he doesn’t believe it.

“Explains a lot about you, actually,” he mutters.

Peña makes an aborted _what the hell_ gesture. “What are you implying? Are you accusing me of something?”

Murphy tilts his head back just slightly and looks at Peña with half-closed eyes. It would seem coy, if not for the intense rage scrawled across his features.

“You never apologized, you know,” he says.

“For what?” Peña asks, and for the second time that week, he has the breath knocked out of him as Murphy grabs him and bodily slams him against the wall.

Instinctively, he puts his hands up to defend himself, but after a short scuffle his partner comes out victorious, his forearm barred across Peña’s neck and his other hand clenched in the collar of his jacket. Peña has one hand around Murphy’s wrist, trying to pry his partner’s arm off his throat, and his other arm braced on the wall behind him. But Murphy uses the few inches he has on Peña to his advantage, pressing in to hold Peña still against the wall. His knee digs into Peña’s thigh.

“Get — the fuck — off — me — ”

“ _Don’t_ play this game with me, Javi,” Murphy seethes, close enough that Peña can smell the cheap whiskey and tobacco on his breath. Behind him, the cold, hard length of his handgun bites into his spine. And isn’t this just a fitting picture of his life down here — him, backed into a corner, and his partner with all his righteous fury before him, and the everpresent promise of violence at his back. They never did fight this out in the embassy. “You fucking know well _for what_.”

And Murphy is right, because Peña does know _for_ _what_. He still feels a residual twinge of panic when he thinks about _for what_. Connie, frantically pacing in his kitchen, saying _Steve hasn’t come home_. The image of Murphy, throat cut, two shots to the back of the head, bled out in a ditch on the side of a road. Another state-sponsored funeral, another photo for the case file. The many-headed monster they hunt turning back on them.

He knows that as DEA, they’re supposedly untouchable down here, but ever since Escobar’s escape, it’s felt like everything’s changed. Like there are no more rules and they’re just careening blindly toward a bad, bad ending. 

“Listen,” his partner says. “I don’t know what the fuck kind of deal you’ve worked out with Cali, and I don’t want to know. Pacho Herrera could be sucking your dick in exchange for insider information, for all I care. At least I can claim plausible deniability when this comes back to bite you, ‘cause it will, but I didn’t ask to become collateral damage because my own partner sold me out.”

“I didn’t _sell you out_ — ”

“Of course you didn’t. You were just doing what you thought needed to be done. And who gives a shit about the consequences, ‘cause it all evens out as long as we win, right? And we _gotta_ win, ‘cause if we don’t, what does that make us? How are we supposed to live with this?” 

Murphy’s looking at Peña like someone’s holding a gun to his head, and all of a sudden, Peña understands. There’s real panic in Murphy’s eyes, helplessness, loneliness, the frantic desperation of a man wading knee-deep up a river of blood with a target painted on his back and, in his eyes, hated and betrayed by the people who were supposed to be his allies.

Murphy’s not angry, or he _is_ , and justifiably so, but he’s also afraid. Fucking terrified.

“God _damnit_ , Murphy,” Peña says, and Murphy snarls, showing teeth, and then all of a sudden Murphy's mouth is on his, hard, insistent, and whether it's out of provocation or desperation or punishment, Peña can't tell.

He reciprocates out of pure reflex, but almost instantly Peña thinks that out of all the bad decisions he’s made recently, this one is the worst by far. Murphy’s scared and furious and only half-sober and his wife and kid aren’t even six hours gone, _fuck_ , but he’s moving against Peña like he needs it to save his life. And maybe he does. Maybe he needs the kind of hollow, temporary relief from the frustration and anger and fear that only this can offer. It'd be downright hypocritical of Peña to judge his partner for coping like this, and it's really not like he has any better ideas, and if there’s one thing he's learned down here, it’s to go big or not at all, so —

“You wanna take it out on me, huh?” Peña murmurs between breaths, baiting Murphy on. “Go ahead, white boy.” A sharp pain slices his lip and he tastes something slick and coppery on his tongue, ‘cause his partner is a goddamn fucking animal.

“Fuck you, Javi,” Murphy says, but he doesn’t give an inch, and he doesn’t sound like he wants any of it to stop.

“Don’t you wish,” Peña says, sliding his hand down his partner’s chest, over his belly.

Murphy makes a sound kind of like he’s been shot when Peña gets a hand around his dick, moving just slowly enough to wind Murphy up. He’s heaving for breath like a drowning man going for air.

“Come on — you asshole — ”

“Fucking work for it,” Peña taunts, and Murphy bites back a whimper and pushes into his touch. He stops trying to choke Peña out in favor of pressing the entire length and weight of his body against him, burying his face into the crook of Peña’s shoulder, and swearing quietly against his neck.

“Ah shit, _shit_ — ”

Peña has the sudden, sick thought that Murphy's confusing this with self-preservation, that he's mistaken Peña's horribly awry attempts to provide him with some veneer of protection with the sense that he's somehow expendable. Peña had gone behind Murphy's back, he had left him in the dark, he'd put the man's family at risk and easily  _could have gotten him killed_.

And he never  _did_ apologize for any of it.

“I’m sorry,” Peña says abruptly. He's done a lot of wrong, but there are some lines that are still sacred to him, that he would never step across. Not this betrayal. Not with his partner.  But his words still feel like too little, too late. “I didn’t mean — I shouldn’t have — ” 

“It’s okay, Javi, it’s alright,” Murphy says, voice breaking. "Please, please, — "

“C’mon, you got it,” Peña urges. He brings his free hand up gently around the back of his partner’s head, holding him there as he moves faster. “ _Está bien_ , it’s okay — ”

“Javi, Javi, oh _fuck_ ,” Murphy whines, and then exhales a quiet, broken moan and shudders against Peña. 

“That’s it,” Peña says, and presses his lips one last time against the line of his partner’s neck. He lets go of Murphy, takes in his partner’s messed-up hair and the blood, _his_ blood, smeared around his mouth, his unreadable wide-eyed look. Murphy, one hand braced against the wall over Peña’s shoulder, doesn’t look any prouder of himself than Peña feels, but at least he seems calmer now. This kind of a distraction will do that. Peña knows this. He’s a bad, bad man, and Murphy tries so hard to be a good one, and whatever Peña fucking gets for doing this, for putting Murphy in this situation, is exactly what he deserves.

“Javi, you have to — find a better way to solve your problems,” Murphy says though he won’t make eye contact, and Peña guesses that’s as close to absolution as he’ll get from his partner. He feels a deep relief. Some days, when he’s forgotten his own allegiances and is on the verge of giving up on the mission entirely, Murphy is the only thing keeping him grounded. He doesn’t want to think about how he would handle it if his partner got himself hurt or killed because of his own questionable choices. Of which, lately, there seem to be too many. “If that's what it takes to get you to say you're sorry — ”

It’s flippant and familiar banter, but Murphy’s still not looking him in the eye.

“I meant what I said,” Peña says, sinking every ounce of sincerity he can into his words. He needs his partner to know he’s not lying, not this time. “I _am_ sorry.”

“Yeah. You keep saying that, maybe you'll believe it.”

“Murphy,” Peña says, shifting around so his gun isn't jabbing into his back as sharply.

Murphy must sense how serious he is, because he straightens up and smooths out his perpetual bitter half-smirk into a solemn expression. He looks at Peña carefully, blankly, for a long, long while.

“It just feels like everyone’s leaving,” Murphy says, and his voice is remarkably steady given the hurt in his eyes. “Carrillo’s gone, and Connie and Olivia — and, and even fuckin’ Escobar just walked right out the back door …” 

“ _Malparido_ ,” Peña says reflexively, the way his grandmother would cross herself upon mention of the devil. Like that motherfucker means as much to him as his wife and kid and his ex-closest ally, but on some level Peña supposes he _does_ , isn’t that fucked up. 

“I just can’t — ” Murphy says, and stops, and tries again. “Just _don’t_ , Javi.”

“I won’t,” Peña says. He studies the slivers of light cast on the floor by the sun through the blinds and stares through the window to the deceptively calm blue sky of a Colombian autumn. Thinks that maybe all that separates them from the men they hunt is that they refuse to give up the fantasy that the _good_ choices and the _right_ choices are the same thing. That everything they do, no matter how well-justified, is just more unending cruelty inflicted upon themselves and this beautiful, godforsaken country. “I’m not going anywhere.”

**Author's Note:**

> shoutout to the person who asked me to write this, now please come make good on my request to PUNCH ME IN THE FACE
> 
> ahem. i'd like to apologize to like, history in general, but there's not nearly enough content for this show. anyway, i hope you all enjoyed this, please let me know what you think!


End file.
